吃瓜大本营

In Tabler v. Lumpkin, the ACLU represents a Texas death row prisoner whose lawyers refused to represent him at a hearing to determine his capacity to decide whether to give up his state post-conviction appeals, leaving him effectively unrepresented at that hearing. Our petition asks the Supreme Court to review Richard Tabler鈥檚 case and to hold that when a defendant鈥檚 lawyers abandon him, his waiver of further appeals should not bar his access to federal habeas corpus review of the constitutionality of his conviction.

Abdullahi Khalif Noor is a Somali refugee, who was a cab driver living in Seattle when convicted of rape and assault, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has always maintained his innocence. He challenged his convictions in Washington state courts, arguing that prosecutors had suppressed evidence of his innocence in violation of due process and Brady v. Maryland.   Unsuccessful in the Washington state courts, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court. He was again unsuccessful, and sought to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Ordinarily, when a party loses in federal district court they can immediately appeal the decision. But Mr. Noor was barred from doing so because he had not obtained a document Congress has required habeas petitioners receive from federal courts before they can appeal since 1908 鈥� then called a certificate of probable cause, but now called a certificate of appealability (COA).

In Galloway v. Mississippi, the ACLU represents a man on Mississippi鈥檚 death row whose trial attorneys relied on a mere twenty-two-page presentation in support of a life sentence, without first conducting the background investigation that would have enabled them to make informed decisions about what evidence to present. A constitutionally adequate investigation would have uncovered voluminous mitigating evidence that could have caused the jury to decide for life instead of death. The Mississippi Supreme Court rejected Mr. Galloway鈥檚 claim by speculating that trial counsel had an alternative 鈥渟trategy鈥� that precluded their doing a full presentation of the abuse he suffered as a child and his mental disabilities鈥攅ven though Mr. Galloway鈥檚 lawyers asserted no such strategic judgment.